Switching And Inventory
Mar 09, 2015
It's Monday again (or will be by the time I get done writing this, play some games, watch some TV, and go to bed and get some sleep), so it's time for a new video!
The latest engine features to get checked off "the TODO list" are character switching and picking stuff up and sticking it in the inventory.
There is no UI for the character switching yet, and we don't know exactly how we're going to do it, but it's completely functional. Maniac Mansion had a New Kid verb that displayed a list of the kids that you would then click on to switch. We don't have the space for another verb, so we're thinking of an icon in the upper corner that shows the current character and clicking on it pops down a list of icons for the other characters. We don't want to clutter up the screen with icons and menus and other none-authentic crap , so it will take some time to visually figure this out.
The character switching UI is a good example of a task that "can wait". The keys give us all the functionality we need to progress on the core of the game. My development philosophy is to make a quick pass at the whole game, get everything functional and then add and polish in waves. We'll talk about this more over the next few weeks as we put together the playable storyboard version of the game.
For now, you just hit the 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 keys (those will work in the final game as well). Whatever we do, I promise there won't be a bouncy floating arrow above the selected character's head and you won't run around collecting in-game currency in the form of little floating coins or stars.
The second item checked off this week was the inventory. Characters can now can pick up objects that can be used in the construction of sentences.
{
background = "Bank"
... snip ...
bankFlyer =
{
icon = "bank_flyer" // Need a better way to specify this. Hack for now.
name = "Bank Flyer"
verbLookAt = function()
{
currentActor.say("'Open an account TODAY and get a FREE toaster.'")
}
}
bankFlyerHolder =
{
name = "Bank Flyers"
flyers_left = 1
verbLookAt = function()
{
if (flyers_left) {
currentActor.say("It's a stack of promotional bank flyers.")
} else {
currentActor.say("It's empty.")
}
}
verbPickup = function()
{
if (flyers_left) {
flyers_left -= 1
pickupObject(bankFlyer)
if (flyers_left == 0) {
setObjectState(bankFlyerHolder, EMPTY) // pickupObject might do this by default in the future.
}
} else {
verbLookAt()
}
}
}
... snip ...
}
The one thing I have left to do with the inventory is USE obj WITH obj.
I probably should have gotten USE/WITH working for the video, but I lost 3 days last week to GDC. On a side note: Brian Moriarty's talk on LOOM™ was great and I don't know that I've ever been called a SCUMMLord(™?) before.
So, Gary and I have been working on Thimbleweed Park for about 8 weeks now and the engine has made great progress, but I still go through these episodes of panic over how little time I think we have left. I have to stop myself and look at how much has happened in a very short time and that we have 16 months left. I do feel good about where we are and we're laying a solid foundation that will (hopefully!) pay off down the road. We're actually in a really good place right now.
Now... I'm sure the project will go to hell at some point. All projects do, it's part of the process of making a game. I don't think I've ever made a game that didn't feel like a big giant steaming unfinishable pile of crap at some point during it's development.
Rest assured, when Thimbleweed Park does goes to hell, we'll blog about it, so at least you'll get some entertainment and/or educational value out of the meltdown.
Then we'll fix it.
But that's a few months down the road so we're trying to enjoying the fun part of the project while it lasts.
Beginnings are always fun, then there is the boring time, then you go though the dark period, then it becomes fun again, then super stressful, then you ship the game and you never want to see it again, then you come back to it years later and realize it was a pretty damn good game.
On one last note... please help spread the word about the Thimbleweed Park dev blog and if there is anything Gary and I can do to make it better, please let us know.
- Ron
Greetings from Argentina!
I do think adventures games lost something when they lost verbs, I'm not 100% what that is and that's part of the experiment that is Thimbleweed Park.
For me, verbs represent possibilities. On the hand hand they make the interaction scheme look more complex and on the other hand they are great for hilarious object-verb combinitations. Like "Push corpse".... "Open corpse" - I love it! It's the adventure game equivalent of a treasure chest behind a waterfall - which should be a law or something...
The only thing that I would find interesting, at least as a concept: Having a character-specific-verb:
Clown -> "Squirt" ("Squirt water" on "corpse")
Detective -> "Shoot"
etc.
That being said - it could be solved the same way as with the character switching: By fixed character specific inventroy items.
Loved Uninvited though...
If a game only displays the "open" and "close" default fallbacks when trying them on everything, it might get tedious.
(I think this was a concern for some people about the voiceovers, they thought it would reduce the sheer quantity of snarky and delicous writing :) )
In my words - what was lost was a few things. When I was a boy, and Maniac Mansion and Zak were out, I kept saying to my friends, "You have to see these games! You can do EVERYTHING YOU WANT in them!".
So even while you'll just get a "That doesn't seem to work" message again and again and again, trying to do whatever you please -- there is a lot of humor to be had in here. Yes, it's childish but we loved to try and PUSH characters around and see if they react, we tried to OPEN all kinds of devices, we would READ every object just hoping there'd be some labeling, we'd TALK to objects if only we could, we'd try to GIVE random items to characters just to see what they have to say about that, .. and then there are other hilarious things and brainless jokes that many people may not find funny at all.
Generally trying to do as much nonsense in a game as you can get away with, because you can do *anything* you want! It was so incredibly fun to play that game even when you tried to play it without making any sense.
Remember how many people say that reading a book gets your imagination going?
You have these verbs in front of you ... all the time. They are potential to fuel your imagination. Even these simple verbs have you constantly looking at them, and the game world - and it's like you can see yourself trying out all the coolest or stupidest combinations.
These verbs, even if it's only 9 if them now ... they instill the feeling that can do it. All of it.
For the switching: You could have the switchable characters as "items" in the inventory and switch by "using" them.
I know it's not really a priority right now, but it bugs me that there are no crude 8-bit sound effects. The videos feel weird because they already look so great that they trick my brain into thinking it's already a playable game that I feel baffeld that there is no sound. I check my volume settings every time! Damn you Silent Park!
One question: You specify the icon for the bankFlyer object in the code of the bank room. But wouldn't that be a problem if you load a save game where you have the bankFlyer but are outside the bank? (so the bank room hasn't been loaded yet in the current play session?)
Can we please have F5 as a key binding for a good old load/save dialog?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Tentacle#mediaviewer/File:Day_of_the_Tentacle_Founding_Fathers.jpg
You could do that, some other funky effect, or have each character's UI personalized with color or design or whatever else.
I was even going to tell that maybe the verb/inventory colors could match that character's dialog color.
:)
have a contest for this game and I think that's great.
We get to come up with a line for a character and then
you include the winning line in Thimbleweed Park. They
had a contest for the first Transformers movie where
you would come up with a line for Optimus Prime and
then he would say it in the movie.
I couldn't sleep so I thought of some lines for the
characters to say when they look at the painting
in the bank:
It wouldn't look better in 3D.
Looks like da Vinci's mugshot.
This really brings out the pain in PAINting.
It could scare away bank robbers.
A drunk painter met a drunk banker...
The frame must be worth more than the painting.
Regarding the clock in the bank:
I can feel heat, it must be overclocked or summertime.
It's relative like my relatives.
An alarm clock so the teller won't fall asleep.
Is this Big Ben?
The clock is right twice a day.
I'm late for my first day of school.
I think it would be funny if there's a store
in Thimbleweed Park that's selling alibis.
Alibi $10
P.S. I suppose it might be possible to play a "perfect game" and not have to transfer items between characters, but that very unlikely and probably not very efficient.
That sounds like it could be an achievement.
Adventure games probably offer the best "reason" for achievements, as there could potentially be lots of funny unknown accomplishments that lend themselves well to the concept. You have all of the things you are expected to do, we'll call them milestones; so you can grant accomplishments for those, as well as funny interactions with people objects, etc.
Anybody else want to second or jump on the train?
Keeping the status label at mousepointer would probably require a smaller font to not obscure to much of the visible game area.
All the characters have pagers as the first item in their inventory. To change characters, you page them. Characters are added as playable as soon as they obtain a pager.
*fits the time period well
*gives a real-world explanation behind character switching
*can be used for a few Easter eggs and gags (e.g. dialing 1138)
*getting paged in certain scenes triggers unique responses (e.g. while in the bathroom)
*after you use the pager a few times, you can just quickly click on it and then the person's name without the game being interrupted
*the Clown's pager isn't real and it's all a figment of his imagination. It also squirts water.
*running out of battery narrows the focus of the puzzles (i.e. escape the room puzzles where you can't change characters during this time)
My comment is the sole property of Terrible Toybox, Inc.
I think it was in Simon the Sorcerer 1 where accessing the game menu was done by having a postcard in the invetory which you could click.
Only if you meet an other character you will "learn" the possibility to swith to this person.
By "using" this or ""looking at" or "opening" face book you will get short infos about the person and have the possibilty
to switch to this character.
For instance, you could shrink the scroll buttons of the inventory a bit (btw: could we scroll using the mouse wheel, or does this ruin the feeling?) in order to place the item underneath them.
In this regard, I also like the pager, and it might be simple and remarkable enough to only use a small sprite for it. Maybe even a two-color icon instead of a real sprite for an inventory item. You could still indicate whether there is the ability to change characters in the current situation or not.
BTW: I really like to see how such a seemingly minor design question, which is practically irrelevant technically, can be really hard to come up with a proper solution for it...
- In the original games if you pick up stuff, the character went there, picked it up and then turned around and possibly said something and didn't remain in the spot of the object picken up (to avoid obscuring it).
- Is this game situated in 'backwoods' town / was there a short summary of the place or history of it already posted
- Have some subtle hints that high "assets" to capital ratio, then elsewhere in the game a subtle note indicating that the bank owns some rotting houses or wasteland
- not sure how to make this funny but maybe a conversation option to do investments for some of the characters and then in the end of the game find out that what happened (some sort of zero/negative-sum quip where the characters tell each other about their fortune being on opposite sides of same deal)
I just think it would look neat if they turned around, took a step toward the player and slightly to side and said something. Atleast when the object they pick would be obscured by them if it was an object that could be operated several times.
1) Forgive me if this has been asked about and answered before, but will the different playable characters be able to talk to and respond to one another, and give different responses based on the locations they are in, what's going on and how far along the game's story you are?
2) Kind of a silly question, but at 1:06 I see that the Male Detective walks right through the Female Detective, I'm guessing that that's designed to be that way and there won't be any obstructive/unnecessary collision detection between characters? I think of the original Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy games where you are trying to go into different doors and narrow hallways in towns/castles and there would always be that one freakin' annoying NPC blocking the way and taking forever to move out of the way, often times seeming to do their best job of trolling the player lol.
2) There will be NO character collision. It's annoying and doesn't provide any gameplay in an adventure game.
Of course it might be annoying in an adventure to switch to a character and find out he is suddenly in a totally different place and you have to walk him (or her) through half the town to get back where he (or her) has stuff to do when you left him (or her) there in the first place. But there might be potential for some fun based on the location where he (or she) was waiting to be switched back to.
As we switch over we could find characters in a conversation with someone ("...So that's where you can find the fuel for the chainsaw. But now excuse me, I have a feeling I have stuff to do.") or sleeping on the sidewalk (because we left him alone with nothing to do for so long). This doesn't have to happen ALL the time, but now and then it could create the illusion that these characters have lives - even when we are not watching them.
Of course this is an idea you might throw over as soon as you realize how much work it is to come up with those fun situations and all the coding behind it. Wait... I'm not selling this right.
It's stuff like this that makes it more than a game. Think of the potential!
I want to leave Hoagie just where I left him so that Bernard can flush the wine to him and he can go bury it. I think it'd seriously suck if Hoagie decided on his own to have a chat with George Washington four screens away.
Default verb should just be on left click whenever you have finished an action and not explicitly selected a new verb.
Great, great blog by the way!
Way more fun and interesting than Doublefines overblown documentary.
So my idea is: either lose the drab or compensate it somehow by replacing ordinary items with either unexpected items or some sort of crazy versions of the ordinary item. eg. here you could have much more interesting painting (and have a character say it looks fake upon inspection if that character had some sort of talent in such) and a talking cuckoo clock.
P.S.: I couldn't answer the seckrit question correctly, so please, can you find something easier?
When watching the video, I was really waiting for one actor handing over the item to the other actor.
Well, I guess that's the cliffhanger for next week's episode? ;-)
As there is no "general" thread on this worlds-greates-dev-blog-ever (man, it really is, no joking), I'll just post the following link about providing feelies in this here thread:
https://www.gamersedition.com/
Turn on
Turn off
New Kid
It will be more Maniac Mansion™ and Zak McKracken™ style (or 1987 style).
I do like the idea of the customized UI for each character (could do something interesting with the UI for the clown, for example, like crazy commands that change name or function randomly, etc. - preferably in a way that isn't TOO annoying). I also like the walkie talkie idea, you probably won't switch characters THAT often, and if you need to, you still have the shortcut keys. Having the 4 icons at the right of the inventory works for me too (although I can see myself accidentally clicking them when I wanted to use an inventory item, which would be annoying).